Tearing Down Statues

2017-09-01

Category:politics

As the tearing down statues hype dies down in the mainstream media, there have been no real solutions. Much of this has been because the people who argue the loudest have no idea about what is really going on. This has led to calls for taking down Mount Rushmore or statues of the the American founding fathers because they may be offensive to some groups. This argument, of course, misses the whole point.

History has shown us that the winners get to put up statues and monuments. That's just how it is. This is important to the argument because of the specific statues targeted for destruction. We are taking down confederate statues.

For those not aware of American history, the confederacy lost the Civil War back in 1865. It wasn't just a close loss either. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman led the troops that burned much of the confederate infrastructure with his scorched earth policies. He also accepted the surrender of many of the confederate officers he encountered. This is a total defeat of the confederacy.

Many of the statues appeared a century later during the civil rights movement. Many southern white people didn't like that they were being forced to drink from the same water fountains as people with more melanin, so they balked. They wanted to remember back when blacks were property. This is why they put up the statues, not to commemorate their embarrassing total defeat.

Today, white supremacists like symbols, such as the confederate statues, as rallying points for their nonsense. These "people" have an affinity for losers such as themselves, as evidenced by their connection with nazis and the confederates. Since we discourage losers from getting too uppity, we are removing these focuses. Again, the statues are of the losing side, so we were really very nice about letting the losers have them in the first place.

What does that have to do with Mount Rushmore? The "it might offend someone" argument is never valid because you can always find someone who will be offended. The question you have to ask is, "Is the monument created to commemorate the people who won?" As sad as it is that we've nearly wiped out the indigenous peoples here, the natives cannot be said to have won in the big scale. The monument stays.

Some people will claim about life not being fair. What they really mean is that life is horrifically fair and they just don't like it. Part of life being harsh is that there are wars and someone wins and someone loses. After the war, the winners get to do what they want and the losers have to cope.